HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JACK ARNOLD (October 14, 1916 – March 17, 1992)

C. Jerry Kutner

8 years ago

Photo: Director Jack Arnold(right) shows star Grant Williams how to handle a giant prop used in the making of The Incredible Shrinking Man.

If director Jack Arnold were alive today, he would be 93. A former stage actor and also a writer who occasionally co-authored his screenplays, Arnold was an underrated master of genre (science fiction, horror, westerns, film noir) and of film form, the only filmmaker to have directed four features in the 3-D format. His best-remembered movies include It Came From Outer Space (1953), The Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954), The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957 – his masterpiece), High School Confidential (1958), The Space Children (1958), and The Mouse That Roared (1959). To celebrate his birthday, and in the spirit of Catherine Grant’s great Film Studies for Freewebsite, Bright Lights After Dark offers the following collection of links relating to director Arnold and his work.

SPECIAL BONUS for readers lucky enough to possess their own anaglyphic (red/green) 3-D glasses – a clip from It Came From Outer Space (1953) that shows Arnold’s feeling for the otherness of landscape and why I consider him the first American master of three-dimensional mise-en-scene. (Via David Cairns.)